Letters And Comments For 06/18/2016

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Your suspicions are justified. For some types of books, splitting them into three volumes make sense. I recently worked with one of over 400 pages that would have been better split into several, each on one topic. But for a devotional, that makes no sense. It should cover the entire year or not at all. Doing only four months per volume makes about as much sense as a four-month calendar.

I’d suggest exploring other options, including looking for ways to lower that page-count to keep the price down. A 7.5 x 9.25 size is wide enough that you might be able to do two days on each page, getting the page count under 200 pages and the price down to about $15. A wide format has another advantage. It lies open better.

It is a fact of life that printing costs are ridiculously high. The problem that we (Royal Knight Inc.) have run into is that you simply can not shorten some books if you want to tell a complete story — and 10 point font is as low as you can go for comfortable print reading. Angela (or her team) has suggested other, larger book sizes, which makes sense (to a point) — but there is also a customer’s perception of ‘correct book size’ Vs the subject. So, some subjects are caught between a-rock-and-a-hard-spot, to use a colloquialism. In this case, E-books would win out for cost reduction — but they are not loved and not practical (for most people and subjects).

I understand that the publisher being spoken of above was likely a slimy crook and this was the only motivation for the split, but the reality is — print cost money.

There is no perfect solution.

– Wendy Jones, author
Highlander Imagine: Beyond Infinity
Coming June, 2016 from Abuzz Press!
“Duncan MacLeod becomes embroiled in an adventure, which takes him to the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacán. Having purchased a rare set of ancient South American llama statues, Duncan is unaware of their ritual significance to an immortal Olmec, named Kawill, who intends to repeat a dark ritual, written on a codex in the Olmec language, and stop time, as the Aztecs understood it. Can Duncan stop this Immortal before time is up?”

This company needs to be called out publicly for practicing such unethical conduct. I certainly hope the author heeds your good advice. How lucky we authors are to have you in our corner!

Preparing magazine distribution lists to submit queries to seems to be the most difficult task that novice freelance writers struggle with. I can say this because I have coached about 50 aspiring travel writers in the past couple of years, and notice that their biggest “sticking point” is when they start preparing their distribution lists. This task ranks even harder than researching their topic and writing their query letters. Many beginners simply walk away from this task because they find it too daunting and they never see their stories published. This is a shame because, with some perseverance and knowledge about where to find magazine leads, many of these writers would sell their stories & make some tidy $$.

I think Angela is too nice to say that part of a writer’s work is to research markets. It takes a lot of time, especially since the markets are constantly changing. That’s why you can’t ask someone else to do it for you (at least not without paying them). You can’t just say, “It’s a science article; therefore, send it to all science magazines.” You have to make sure it’s right for each particular science magazine, and you need to know which column in the magazine it will fit into. Only then can you tailor a query to the magazine that will possibly get you a response.

– Melanie

~~~

Melanie is right, yet I’d like to say that its okay you didn’t know that. You’re in for a journey now! I hope you have a wildly successful writing career. When you start going to the Library and seeing some of the information printed you will discover so much to write about. You and you alone must discover what publications are worthy of your work. You can only find that out if you read them…the other side of our jobs. 🙂

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WritersWeekly.com is one of the oldest and most respected sites on freelance writing. It has been published continuously since 1997. It's part of the BookLocker.com, Inc. family of businesses, which includes POD and ebook publisher BookLocker.com, Abuzz Press and Pub Preppers.